Managed Care, with its primary focus on systems management and cost control, needs a partner – a system that can meet human needs, and restore to individuals the power to make choices. HealthWorld Online provides the resources needed by individuals to make those choices, and opens the door to a new approach: Self-Managed Care™.

HealthWorld connects what have become society's two hottest topics – Healthcare, and the Internet. Both of these are in a state of dramatic, almost daily change – and HealthWorld is an eager, active participant in helping to focus that change toward a positive new direction – for the individual … and for society.

Vision
HealthWorld Online has a vision – and a mission.

Our vision focuses on the individual.

We recognize that – more than any health professional, no matter how qualified or proficient – the individual is primarily responsible for his or her own health and well-being.

With access to comprehensive, integrated health and medical information, the individual can begin to take action for maintaining and restoring health – and can most appropriately and cost-effectively utilize our society's excellent natural and conventional health care systems.

We call this approach "Self-Managed Care™," and see this as our society's natural transition from the Managed Care system's "disease management" approach – what one former United States Surgeon General called the "sick-care system" – to a well-care approach built around personal desires and actions.

In personal terms, YOU are responsible for YOUR health – and given the tools, the information and the power, YOU can take control of your health. When you are seriously ill, you want help – a doctor, a prescription, or an answer. That's "medical care." But when you need non-emergency care, you need information to help you recover or stay well, and to improve your overall level of health. Prevention is about lifestyle choices – choices that require accurate information. Those choices are also "Self-Managed Care™."

The single most important factor in anybody's health is the "self" – what you do for yourself and to yourself. To sustain health, or to recover from illness, you can be a passive "unit of care" – or you can seek out information and advice, make decisions and become your own heath general contractor. You are the one person best equipped to take the first step to determine what you need – from a diet, to a diagnosis, to specific treatments. More than any one doctor or specific approach to health care, YOU, the "self," is the key to health. That, too, is "Self-Managed Care™."

The bridge that can carry individuals, on demand, from the existing sick-care approach to the evolving "Self-Managed Care™" system is the interactive electronic environment – the Internet – and its leading health information resource, HealthWorld Online.

Mission
Our mission is equally clear. Our mission is to create and actualize our vision.

Through this global, interactive electronic medium known as the Internet, HealthWorld Online is committed to fulfill the public and professional demand for reliable, integrative health, wellness and medical information, products and services.

Our goal is to create the means for individuals and society to transition away from today's "sick-care" system of managed care to a "well-care" system of Self-Managed Care. The "means" to achieve this transformation – information, clear, accurate, reliable information that covers the full spectrum of health care disciplines and options – is at the very heart of HealthWorld Online.

HealthWorld Online is focusing on what have become the two "hottest" topics in society today – healthcare, and the information revolution. Both of these topics are in a state of dramatic, almost daily change – and HealthWorld Online is an eager and active participant in trying to focus that change toward positive new directions – for individuals … and for our global society.

By taking advantage of online technological advances that literally did not exist even one year ago, HealthWorld Online can provide, generally at no charge, a full scope of empowering information – in an easily accessible format – to any individual who has a "need to know" and access to an Internet-linked computer. Today, that means more than 30 million Americans and more than 50 million people worldwide – by the end of this decade, those numbers should exceed 100 million Americans and more than a quarter-billion people around the world.